Is DCCC chief Steve Israel telling House Dems to vote against Dem budgets?

Another quick one while I work on something longer. Last week the House voted on a number of budgets — the Senate budget bill, the House Progressive “Back to Work” budget, the Congressional Black Caucus budget, and the Paul Ryan budget. All but the Ryan budget failed, of course. But the list of voters within the roll calls is interesting. And studying those, Howie Klein at DownWithTyranny makes a great catch.

His post is well worth a read, but I want to pull out just this piece — Steve Israel, Pelosi’s hand-picked DCCC chair, has been telling freshman and “vulnerable” Democrats in the House to vote with Republicans. Get that? A member of the House Dem leadership is whipping Dems to vote against Dem-proposed bills.

[But] Many of them– the freshmen and vulnerable members in red-leaning districts, were counseled by Steve Israel, chairman of the DCCC, to vote with the Republicans. He does that kind of thing; it’s a losing strategy that causes low Democratic turnout. It killed the Democrats in 2010… but Israel has learned nothing from the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse.

Among the Democrats who voted against the Senate budget are these 20 Democrats on the DCCC Frontline List, represented the seats Israel sees as the most vulnerable in 2014:

The Hill [link here] claims “House Democrats were instructed to vote for the Senate Democratic budget,” but I [Klein] heard from several Members that Steve Israel was urging “vulnerable” incumbents to vote against it.

Blue Dog Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) said he voted against the Senate budget because it did not go far enough on entitlements.

“It is not enough entitlement reform in there going forward. It needs to be a more complete and balanced picture and it wasn’t bipartisan in the end of the day,” Schrader told The Hill.

We wrote about that Frontline list here, the list of Dems who will get “extra help” from the DCCC in their House races in 2014. This is the second vote this year for which the following statement is true (the first being the minimum wage bill):

By the way, that phrase of Schrader’s — “wasn’t bipartisan” — could well be the messaging “cover story” from the Steve Israels of the world. It would be if I were Israel. You certainly hear it a lot from people on that list as their reason for voting with Boehner and against the rest of the Dems. For example …

Kuster’s remarks repeated her theme of working across aisles in a bi-partisan manner, which was well received by the business oriented audience of 60 people. Describing herself as a “frugal Yankee” who was “born bi-partisan,” Kuster said, “There’s no question in my mind that we do need to cut spending.”

“No question we do need to cut spending.” That’s certainly bipartisan, in the sense that the leaders of both parties are agreed; they all want to cut the safety net.

Ann Kuster also brags about voting with Boehner:

Kuster said she thinks she has a 100 percent voting record with Speaker John Boehner …

Obviously some of those votes were easy (the VAWA, for example), but the phrasing … has some Steve Israel been whispering in her shell-like ear? Certainly seems like it. If not, she got the phone call that said “wear ‘bipartisan’ to high school today.” I suspect there will be much more disappointment from Ann “Bipartisan” Kuster.